Unit 4: What is Media Literacy

What is media literacy. Well, literacy is commonly known as a person’s ability to read and write. When we use our reading and writing skills towards media content, we can view it as media literacy. It is defined in our class text as, “a set of perspectives that we actively use to expose ourselves to media to process and interpret the meaning of the messages we encounter.” With today’s technology advancements and growing social media world, we as people are constantly viewing media content on a daily basis. Media literacy is being practiced everyday with our emails, texts, social media posts, screen watching etc. Media literacy is present everywhere; from group chats with a few of your friends to worldwide discussion groups, clubs, and movements, small businesses to huge business corporations, local newspapers and radio stations reports to nationwide networks bringing you worldwide politics. We are all connected around the world. With that being said, media literacy goes beyond just reading and writing in the sense that we choose the type of media that we want to expose ourselves to, what we choose not to view, and how we interpret the content we do view, so we all spend our time viewing different media content. Our class text breaks media literacy down into seven different components. “Media literacy relies on Analysis, Evaluation, Grouping, Induction, Deduction, Synthesis, and Abstracting.” We use these seven skills of media literacy to break down the content we view, evaluate the parts that are important or intriguing to us, to make meaning out of the text, and then organize it all and make connections. When talking about media literacy, these skills help develop media into “knowledge structures.” We consume so much media content in a day that we can’t possibly remember everything we see in a day, but our minds go into “automatic pilot” where we filter what we want to take in. After deciding what content to take in and after using the seven skills of media literacy, we then memorize what we consumed to develop these knowledge structures. Our text defines the concept of knowledge structures as “sets of organized information in our memory. We use these patterns as maps to tell us where to get information and also where to go to retrieve information we have previously encoded into our knowledge structures…Information is the key to knowledge structures.”